Livestock maintenance has proven to be a difficult issue to handle. In particular, the need to provide sufficient nourishment to cattle and other livestock animals in a safe, reliable, and secure manner has always required a certain degree of attention that could be better spent in other areas. Generally, livestock owners will not provide their own feed for such animals, but must purchase such materials from a co-op or other farm location situated a distance from their own land. As such, the need for reliable transport of such materials is of great importance since large amounts, dependent on the number of livestock animals involved, require significantly large tanks and thus vehicles for such an undertaking. Likewise, upon collection from the co-op location (or other like place), the feed materials are not only transported, but must be stored as well within a suitable environment to best prevent pests from entering and devouring the feed, as well as to prevent undesirable caking and hardening of such milled materials during storage. Temperature fluctuations during storage, as well as moisture levels may further complicate such matters, leading to feed spoilage or, as noted above, unwanted hardening, making the feed unfit for livestock consumption or difficult to remove from the storage tank or bin, itself. In any event, the ability to provide proper collection, transportation, and storage, at least, is very important in order to at least permit the livestock owner an efficient and cost-effective manner of providing feed materials to his or her animals on demand and in a safe manner.
Delivery, then, of such stored materials is another important issue. Dependent on the amount of feed materials collected and stored, the delivery may be of any portion on a daily basis from the stored supply. If the feed materials are stored in a tank assembly (or silo), removal and ultimate placement within a proper location (such as a feed trough) may be difficult to accomplish for a number of reasons. Again, hardening of the feed may prevent removal from the storage location and require excessive forces to be applied to properly loosen the feed materials prior to delivery. Furthermore, controlled delivery at a certain rate out of a tank or silo may be necessary to prevent waste of feed, too. Additionally, if the tank or silo are closed, knowledge of the actual amount of feed remaining may be hard to estimate in such a scenario.
As it is, such problems in the livestock feeding industry have not been of significant help. Placement in open-ended tanks that allow mixing of feed materials to form a final composition for delivery to cattle, pigs, horses, sheep, goats, and the like, have been proposed, but do not provide sufficient methods to prevent caking and hardening, ostensibly because of the direct delivery subsequent to mixing undertaken. Thus, long-term storage is not an issue for such devices. As well, tank vehicles have been disclosed that allow for a user to drive to a co-op or like location and have feed directly placed therein and then transported to a desired livestock feed location Such devices, however, do not provide hardening prevention components or methods, and delivery processes are limited to open augers that drive feed out of an opening via a trough within the tank. Such a device may permit a certain degree of control in delivery, but, as well, the open-ended auger structure does not provide a manner of controlled stoppage to prevent waste of excess feed if necessary. Nowhere, either, are there any concerns with moisture prevention or feed amount monitoring without actually opening the subject tank for empirical assessment.
In other words, there remains a significant need for improvements within the livestock feed delivery/storage/collection industry. A manner of providing an all-in-one device that allows for secure collection, sealed storage, caking prevention, pest elimination, moisture reduction, and effective controlled delivery on demand and at a specific selected location and rate has simply not been made available to livestock owners in the past.